Ezra Pound In Italy

Ezra Pound spent most of his life in Italy and wrote about it incessantly in his poetry. Only by following his footsteps, acquaintances and composition processes can we make sense of and enjoy his forbidding Cantos. This study provides for the first time an account of Pound’s Italian wanderings and of what they became in his work. After this study we will be able to read Pound as a guide to the places, people and books he loved, and we will share his the poet traveler’s joys and discoveries.

This fascinating account of Ezra Pound and Italian Fascism allows the reader to understand the causes and results of Pound's ideology and actions.

By bringing Italian primary sources and new approaches to the cultural project of Mussolini’s regime to bear on Ezra Pound’s prose work, this book shows how Pound’s modernism changed as a result of involvement in Italian politics and culture.

Explores W.B. Yeats and Ezra Pound's relationship as played out against the backdrop of Mussolini's Italy in the 1920s and 1930s and shows how Yeats, Pound, and others in their Italian network developed a late modernist style aimed at effecting world change.

At last, a definitive, paperback edition of Ezra Pound's finest work.

‘An extraordinary book of real passionate research’ Edmund de Waal In 1945, Ezra Pound was due to stand trial for treason for his broadcasts in Fascist Italy during the Second World War. But before the trial could take place Pound was pronounced insane. Escaping a potential death sentence he was shipped off to St Elizabeths Hospital near Washington, DC, where he was held for over a decade. At the hospital, Pound was at his most contradictory and most controversial: a genius writer – ‘The most important living poet in the English language’ according to T. S. Eliot – but also a traitor and now, seemingly, a madman. But he remained a magnetic figure. Eliot, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell and John Berryman all went to visit him at what was perhaps the world’s most unorthodox literary salon: convened by a fascist and held in a lunatic asylum. Told through the eyes of his illustrious visitors, The Bughouse captures the essence of Pound – the artistic flair, the profound human flaws – whilst telling the grand story of politics and art in the twentieth century.

Ezra Pound was an influential propagandist for British, Italian and ultimately German fascist movements. Using long-neglected manuscripts and cutting-edge approaches to fascism as a 'political religion', Feldman argues that Pound's case offers a revealing case study of a modernist author turned propagator of the 'fascist faith'.

First published in 1970, this is a detailed and balanced biography of one of the most controversial literary figures of the twentieth century. Ezra Pound, an American who left home for Venice and London at the age of twenty-three, was a leading member of ‘the modern movement’, a friend and helper of Joyce, Eliot, Yeats, Hemingway, an early supporter of Lawrence and Frost. As a critic of modern society his far-reaching and controversial theories on politics, economics and religion led him to broadcast over Rome Radio during the Second World War, after which he was indicted for treason but declared insane by an American court. He then spent more than twelve years in St Elizabeth’s Hospital for the Criminally Insane in Washington, D.C. In 1958 the changes against him were dropped and he returned to Italy where he had lived between 1924 and 1945.